December 27, 2006
How to Think About the War
By Herbert E. Meyer
Whether we are winning or losing in Iraq is open to debate, but it's clear that our national conversation about the war has begun to fail. Today our elected leaders, our most influential commentators, and even ordinary Americans chatting among themselves at work or at their dinner tables, have begun to repeat their lines like wind-up dolls. All of them, and all of us, are saying the same things over and over again; what started as a conversation has become a shouting match. And when everyone is on "transmit" - but never on "receive" - we cannot hear and so we cannot learn. And if we cannot learn, we've stopped thinking.

We need to start all over again to think about the war, and we mustn't be afraid. After all, we do this with our computers all the time. When a program begins to fail - and they always do because even the simplest program is comprised of complex files that over time become damaged or corrupted -- and when re-booting once or twice doesn't do the trick, we've learned that the only thing to do is to un-install and re-install the program to get a fresh, clean start.

So, let's conduct what scientists would call a "thought experiment." In your mind's eye, go to Control Panel, click on "Add/Remove Programs," scroll down to "The War" and double-click. A box will pop on-screen asking if you really want to un-install. Click "Yes" and you will hear the hard drive chunking and see its green light flashing while the program is removed. Now, let's "re-install" the program in our minds by thinking through, from the beginning, what this war is about:

What "Politics" Really Means

When we talk about politics, we usually mean Republicans versus Democrats, or liberals against conservatives, or the looming scramble among Presidential contenders for their parties' 2008 nominations. But there's another way to talk about politics that goes deeper, and by doing so illuminates the current conflict.

Politics is the relationship between the individual and the State. And for as long as human beings have walked the Earth, we have been struggling to get this right. We've tried everything. We've had kingdoms and empires of all sizes and flavors. We've had military dictatorships, and civilian dictatorships. We've had totalitarian states like fascism on the right, and communism on the left. We've had constitutional monarchies, republics and democracies.

In a sense, each of these is an operating system. Now, we're all familiar with operating systems because we all use computers. Today, for instance, we have Microsoft's Windows operating system, Apple's OS X, Linux, and a few others. Every so often, these operating systems rub against one another in the marketplace. The results can be fairly nasty - technically and legally - but in the end these competing operating systems usually learn to live with one another. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and consumers choose the ones they prefer.

Every so often - in business and in politics - one operating system sets out to utterly destroy all the others. In business, this goal is rarely achieved. Microsoft has a lot of money, but it hasn't got tanks. (If it did, Apple's corporate headquarters would look like a building in downtown Beirut.) But in politics, there really are tanks and other weapons. And when one political operating system sets out to obliterate all the others, the result is a global war.

If Adolf Hitler had been content to remain within Germany's borders, the results of the Nazi operating system would have been ghastly for the German people. But there would not have been World War II. If Lenin, Stalin and their heirs had been content to inflict communism solely within the Soviet Union's borders, life would have been miserable for Soviet citizens. But there would not have been a Cold War.

Now, when you look at history through the prism of operating systems, you find that one operating system has triumphed above all the others: Western Civilization. Its key features are the separation of church and state, the primacy of the individual over the State, the encouragement of artistic expression and intellectual curiosity, free enterprise, and a never-ending struggle to reach equality among the races and sexes. Like all operating systems, Western Civilization has its flaws, its shortcomings and its imperfections - as will any operating system designed and run by human beings. But by any imaginable measure, Western Civilization is history's greatest achievement.

Let's Call it "Radical Islam"

While Western Civilization developed through the centuries, another operating system also took root. Scholars argue over just what to call this operating system, but for convenience's sake let's call it Radical Islam. Its key features are the combination of church and State, the submission of individuals to this combination, the discouragement of artistic expression and intellectual curiosity, the crushing of its people's entrepreneurial talents, and the treatment of women as though they were property rather than people. Just like Western Civilization, this operating system has its flaws, its shortcomings and its imperfections. But unlike Western Civilization, Radical Islam contains a flaw that may not be correctible: it is incompatible with the modern world.

What we all learned on 9-11 is that the leaders of Radical Islam are determined to impose their operating system on us. In other words, their objective is the destruction of Western Civilization. The current conflict is our effort to prevent this from happening.

Look back at history's two most recent attacks on Western Civilization - by fascism in World War II, and by Soviet communism in the Cold War - and you may be surprised to see how sharp were the disagreements among our leaders, our commentators, and our parents and grandparents, over how best to respond. Anyone who believes that "politics" was suspended during these wars - in Washington or at the dinner table - is just plain wrong.

But there was one issue during each of these struggles upon which virtually everyone agreed: Western Civilization deserved to win. Despite its flaws, its shortcomings, and its imperfections, our "operating system" was better than the one that threatened to obliterate us. So we would fight hard - to the death, if necessary - for our survival.

Now we can understand why our conversation about the present conflict has become so fierce, so bitter, and so partisan. Today, there is a significant contingent among us who do not believe that Western Civilization is worth defending, or that our operating system deserves to survive. Those who subscribe to this perception - and they include quite a few of our elected officials - are so focused on the flaws, shortcomings and imperfections of Western Civilization that they are blind to its achievements. So while some of us are debating how to win the war, others among us want only to stop the war. This is why we are not so much talking among ourselves about what to do, but rather talking - shouting, really - past one another.

Simply put, the first decision we need to make is this: Do we intend to win this war whatever the cost? If the answer is "no," then stopping the war now is the only sensible thing to do. It would mean we have chosen to surrender Western Civilization to its enemies, and that we or, more likely, our children and grand-children, will live under the Radical Islam operating system.

If our answer is "yes" - that we intend to win this war whatever the cost - then we had better be prepared to fight with all our strength and power. To understand why, look back at our strategies for winning World War II and the Cold War. In each of these conflicts, our objective wasn't to kill people but rather to crush an operating system. We understood that most Germans weren't Nazis, and that most Russians weren't communists. They weren't the problem; it was the operating system imposed on them by their leaders that threatened us.

How the Cold War Ended

In the Cold War, we were able to crush the Soviet communist operating system without a great deal of violence - a staggering achievement for which, one day, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John-Paul II will be celebrated by history. The Cold War ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. But in World War II, we had no choice but to shoot and bomb our way through Italy, to flatten Germany, and to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan. It was horrific, but it worked. The war ended, the fascist operating system ceased to exist, and the people on whom this operating system had been imposed found their way forward. Japan joined Western Civilization, and Italy and Germany re-joined it.

Although no one seems to have noticed, our strategy for winning the current conflict is strikingly similar to our strategies in the previous conflicts. Our enemies aren't the people on whom the Radical Islam operating system has been imposed, but rather the operating system itself. We are using military power, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, to give moderate Muslims, who comprise the vast majority, the first chance they have had to hold power in a long while. Our hope is that, over time, these moderates will develop an Islamic operating system that is compatible with the modern world and - more importantly - willing to co-exist peacefully with our operating system.

What the Bush Administration has now realized - belatedly - is that to achieve our objective we will need to use more violence than we had thought, and hoped, we would need. That is why the President is seriously considering sending more troops to Iraq. Simply put, we haven't hit the Radical Islam operating system hard enough to crush it. And this means the real issue isn't the number of soldiers we send to Iraq, and perhaps to Afghanistan, but the orders that President Bush gives to our military commanders.

If the President orders our commanders to do the best they can with additional troops to get Baghdad under control, we will merely delay our defeat and suffer more casualties along the way. But if the President's orders are to crush the Radical Islam operating system once and for all - get set for a level of violence we haven't seen since the darkest days of World War II.

When General William Tecumseh Sherman said that "War is hell," he wasn't talking about soldiers fighting soldiers. He meant that to end a war it is necessary to inflict such pain on the civilian population that it will no longer tolerate the war's continuation. That's because no army can keep fighting without at least the tacit support of the civilian population on whose territory it operates. War isn't laser surgery, no matter how technically advanced may be the weapons. War is a miserable, sloppy business in which innocent people suffer greatly. Sherman hated marching through Georgia and inflicting pain on decent people who happened to be living there, but he understood that doing this was the only way to end the war.

Widening the War

The violence we will need to inflict to win won't be limited to Baghdad, or even to Iraq. Just as you cannot fill a bucket with water if that bucket has two big holes in its bottom, we will not end the war in Iraq so long as Iran and Syria continue to interfere. Thus far, we have done nothing whatever to stop Iran and Syria from interfering, and unless we do we cannot win. In other words, to crush the Radical Islam operating system we will need to widen the war. More precisely, the governments of Iran and Syria must be taken out of the conflict, either by forcing these governments to cease fighting, or by removing and replacing these governments.

Honorable people will disagree over what specific steps to take, and how and when to take them. There is nothing wrong with this, and the debate itself is healthy. Indeed, our tolerance for public debate -- even during wartime -- is among the greatest strengths of Western Civilization.

But if we cannot resolve the question of whether or not we intend to win this war whatever the cost, then we will shortly lose the option of deciding. As President Lincoln said of slavery in the US, a house divided against itself cannot stand; we cannot be half-slave and half-free. It took a Civil War to resolve this issue. Today, our choice is whether to fight for Western Civilization at whatever cost, or to stop fighting and accept the gradual erosion of our operating system. And we are so divided over this question that it is scarcely an exaggeration to describe our debate as a kind of civil war. Until we resolve this question, we are stuck with half-measures that delay our defeat while also blocking the path to victory. And in war, if you aren't winning you're losing. There is nothing in between. So we must decide either to give up, or to summon the will to victory.

The trouble is, we have very little time left in which to decide. Indeed, our time to decide has just about run out.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His DVD on The Siege of Western Civilization has become an international best-seller.
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Radical Departure
Is the country's most controversial Middle East scholar mellowing?

by Sadanand Dhume
Philadelphia Magazine
January 2007
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4246
For a pdf of the original article, please click here

The first thing that strikes you about Daniel Pipes is his size. He's six feet, four inches tall, with a slight stoop and a wingspan that would send a piano teacher into rapture. The second remarkable thing about Pipes is something you notice only after he has led you into his book-lined corner office at the Middle East Forum, the Center City think tank he's run for the past 16 years, a place where the stray workplace embellishments include a journalism award from the Zionist Organization of America and a small picture of himself towering over Margaret Thatcher: It's his voice, a carefully modulated hush that forces you to glance anxiously at your tape recorder with a silent prayer.

The gentle demeanor is not what you'd expect of Pipes. Over the years, from his perch at the MEF and in countless books, newspaper op-eds, and appearances on talking-head TV shows, he has become an archetype of the hard-hearted ideologue, anchoring the most conservative pole in the debate over the Middle East, Islam, and terrorism. He has called for religious profiling of Muslims in America, and described the global battle with Islamists—those Muslims who strive for a society governed by their interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law—as "a cosmic battle over the future course of human experience." His views on the Israel-Palestine peace process are, in the words of the writer Christopher Hitchens, "somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon." Once, on the television show Politically Incorrect, actor Alec Baldwin turned to Pipes and declared, "You seem to be in support of every crypto-fascist idea."

On this afternoon in early October, Pipes has just finished hammering out a piece for the New York Sun, where he has a regular column, concerning a group of Muslim taxi drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport who have demanded the right to refuse to pick up passengers carrying alcohol. Instead of simply canceling the drivers' licenses or asking them to forfeit booze-laden fares, airport authorities are considering a compromise: Drivers will be allowed to place an extra light on their roofs signaling their willingness to ferry the offending cargo. "From the airport point of view, this is completely satisfactory," explains Pipes. "Passengers are not stranded. Taxi drivers are content. But from the larger point of view, this has incredible implications: The sharia is now in effect in Minneapolis airport with two different lights. … Think of all the people the drivers might not want to take: Hindus, homosexuals, unmarried couples. … I mean, where does one stop?"

The extended riff is delivered in a tone that blends muted outrage with boyish infectiousness, and for a moment it dusts Pipes, 57, with the manner of an adolescent. It also captures the Pipesian method: the placement of the seemingly trivial in a broader political context, the effortless accretion of detail building up toward a crescendo, the conclusion that teeters on the edge of hyperbole and yet appears perfectly logical. By the time he's finished, you may be forgiven for fretting that the Twin Cities are on their way to resembling Tehran.

Such rhetorical skill is one of the reasons why Pipes—the director of a little-known think tank and author of 14 books that few in the general public will ever read—has managed to occupy an almost mythic space on the ideological plane where people are paid to argue over post-9/11 foreign policy and national security, someone whose bare-knuckled approach to radical Islam delights fans and enrages foes from Peoria to Pakistan. When the Mohammed cartoons roiled much of the world last year, the leftist newsletter CounterPunch went so far as to lay some of the responsibility for a Danish paper commissioning the cartoons at Pipes's door. When a British Muslim organization gave out its "Islamophobe of the Year" award, he was among the contenders. (Other Americans short-listed have included George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.) His personal website, danielpipes.org, attracts three million visitors a year, according to Pipes.

Yet, five years after 9/11, five years after he became a fixture on Fox News and a familiar face on CNN, Pipes is confronting a new challenge. While his views on radical Islam have changed little since he became a member of the prime-time pundit class, the debate over Islam in this country has changed dramatically. And though Pipes continues to joust with his old adversaries on the left—from academics to the media to mainline churches—he now also worries about a view of Islam born of the right, one that sees the religion itself, rather the radical ideology it spawned, as inherently hostile to Western ideals. For the first time, the man who has long been among the world's most polarizing thinkers finds himself in an unfamiliar role—urging restraint.

Pipes employs a catchphrase that captures, if it doesn't adequately explain, his worldview: "Radical Islam is the problem; moderate Islam is the solution." According to Pipes, there's a distinct difference between Islam the religion and Islamism the ideology. The former, says Pipes, is a centuries-old faith for which he has always professed respect. But the latter, he says, is a modern set of beliefs whose adherents seek to create societies based on a political, social and legal system—the sharia—that he sees as misanthropic, misogynist, anti-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and terroristic, among a long list of other unpleasant things.

In 2007, this doesn't sound particularly radical. Even President Bush has drawn lines between Islam and what he called "Islamofacism." But Pipes's standing—among those who both love and loathe him—stems from the fact that he talked about (or, some would say, was obsessed by) radical Muslims long before they were a topic most people ever considered.

Pipes came to the subject in college. Growing up in Boston, the oldest child of Polish Jews who had fled Europe on the outbreak of WWII, he had wanted to be a mathematician, but after his sophomore year at Harvard—where his father Richard taught Russian history- Pipes realized he was in over his head. Instead he decided to study Islamic history, an interest sparked by summer trips to the Sahara and the Sinai. His undergraduate experience seared itself on Pipes in another way as well. He began his freshman year more or less apolitical, but graduated convinced he was a conservative; he felt no sympathy for his fellow students who commandeered University Hall in 1969 to protest the presence of ROTC on campus, and remembers wondering aloud why his classmates would skip meals and classes they had paid for.

Upon graduating, he spent two years studying Arabic in Cairo, haunting the salons of the city's elite as well as the backstreets and cafés where modern Islamism was born, then returned to Cambridge to get his Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history. Around the time Pipes finished his thesis, though, Ayatollah Khomeini set the Iranian Revolution in motion, and there were few people in this country who were able to explain what was happening. Pipes was one of them, and he soon decided to shift his focus from medieval to modern Islam.

One of the reasons Pipes seems to draw so much fire is that unlike most academics, he takes an approach to his subject that is essentially adversarial, a method he seems to have inherited from his father. Along with being a Russian history professor, Richard Pipes was a tenacious anti-communist. Daniel Pipes continued the oppositional tradition. In his second book, he infamously wrote that Muslim scholars had "added relatively little" to the understanding of Islam. Later, he expressed dire warnings about the increasing number of Muslim immigrants in America. Even the way Pipes defines "moderate Islam" is pointedly unsympathetic, argues his critics. "For him, anyone who has legitimacy in the mainstream of Islam can't be a moderate," says Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "He thinks that if a woman wants to wear a headscarf, it's the beginning of the end of Western civilization."

In the early 1980s, Pipes taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard and the Naval War College, but he failed to secure a tenure-track position. Around this time, Middle Eastern studies were in the midst of a profound makeover, and it became clear that there was little room for someone with his political leanings, he says: "I looked around, and the choices were very meager." In 1996, he moved to Philadelphia to run the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank founded in 1955 by staunchly anti-totalitarian Viennese émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé. Eight years later, Pipes spun off the Middle East Forum as a separate entity.

According to its mission statement, MEF aims to "define and promote American interests in the Middle East," and considers those interests to be "fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful; working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; improving the management of U.S. democracy efforts; reducing energy dependence on the Middle East; more robustly asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia; and countering the Iranian threat." It has an annual budget of about $1 million, and gets financial support from institutions such as the conservative Bradley Foundation.

Pipes may live and work in Philadelphia, but he is not really of the city. He doesn't count himself a regular at any local restaurants, and he tends to spend his downtime indoors—with a book (P.G. Wodehouse) or on the treadmill at home. This isn't surprising. Pipes has built a life around propagating a certain view of the world; the view itself, as well as its real-world consequences, resonates most loudly among a thin slice of the terminally wonkish. And though he spends much of his life on the road, traveling to various speaking engagements—and has been in the public eye almost constantly since 9/11—he has managed to maintain a nearly hermetic seal between his public persona and private life. He declines to share the names of his three daughters or what they do. He prefers not to reveal his home phone number or where he lives, except to say that it's in the city and he hasn't moved since he first came to Philly. For security reasons, he doesn't use his own name when calling a cab or limousine to his home. When traveling overseas, he occasionally checks in at a hotel under a different name.

A few weeks after speaking with him in his office, I catch up with Pipes at the Nixon Center in Washington, where he is participating in a panel discussion on the Iraq war sponsored by the center's foreign policy journal, The Nation Interest. (Pipes sits on its advisory council.) Black-and-white pictures of the former president line the walls of a conference room, which quickly fills with a handful of women and two dozen formally dressed men, each of whom you suspect knows the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

Pipes is impressive in such forums. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamism with a polemicist's talent for pithiness. In the Pipes lexicon, Westerners who submit to Muslim restrictions on free speech, as he believes most American and British newspapers did by refusing to reprint the Danish Mohammed cartoons, are playing by the "Rushdie rules," a reference to the famous Iranian fatwa on the author of The Satanic Verses. He describes the "slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam" as "education by murder," an evolution that has included 9/11, the Madrid train attacks, and the 2005 bus and train bombings in London.

As pointed as he can be about Islamists or those who refuse to take the threat of radical Islam seriously—whether in the government or the media or the general public—Pipes employs his verbal skills most mercilessly when discussing his erstwhile colleagues in academia. Several of them, including Jessica Stern of Harvard (who has likened jihad to "a global fad, rather like gansta rap") are listed in an "Idiots' File" on Pipes's website for their views regarding radical Muslims. In 2002, Pipes set up a site called Campus Watch as a way to expose the "analytic failures" and political bias in the field of Middle Eastern studies, "the way Consumer Reports judges a vacuum cleaner to see if it's doing a good job," he says. The website at first featured dossiers on eight prominent Middle Eastern scholars. A firestorm of protest followed, with more than 100 professors writing letters to the site. Pipes eventually dropped the dossiers, but the watchdog function of Campus Watch remains. Though critics have argued that the project stinks of McCarthyism, Pipes finds it ironic that he's accused of trying to shut down free speech on campus. "If you took the Fortune 500, you'd find much more political diversity than if you took 500 Middle East specialists," he says.

Pipes's blunt views of radical Muslims—particularly his assertion that 10 to 15 percent of the world's Muslims are Islamists—have made him few friends in America's organized Muslim community. Several years ago, someone bought the domain danielpipes.com and linked it to a page on the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations that attacked Pipes. He had to threaten a lawsuit to win back the domain, and mutual dislike remains between him and CAIR. Pipes has long accused the organization of being on the wrong side in the war on terror, a charge that CAIR's Hooper says is based entirely on innuendo and guilt by association—"on what my Great-Aunt Tilly did in 1902." In the spring of 2003, after President Bush nominated Pipes to fill a vacancy on the board of the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to the peaceful resolution of conflicts, CAIR spearheaded an effort to deny him the position by organizing a massive letter-writing campaign. (Bush eventually got him on the USIP via recess appointment.)

For all the attention Pipes has drawn for being an alleged Islamophobe, however, he has always drawn a line between Islamists and Islam, between the religion and the ideology. He is still quick to pounce on any special exceptions for Muslims—women demanding the right to wear the headscarf in driver's license photos, those Minnesota cabdrivers—as examples of Islamic law slipping through the backdoor, but he also decries the view of 40 percent of Americans who believe Muslims should carry special identity cards. It's "illegal, immoral, inefficient, you name it," he says.

It's a view that, five years after September 11th, has put him in a new position; no longer is he the bad boy of Middle East punditry. The discussion has changed, and the man once considered the most hard-line anti-Islamist finds himself worried about critics holding a darker view: that Islam is an inherently evil religion. Pipes doesn't have to look far to see how much the conversation has changed; by a five-to-one margin, readers of his own website now disagree with him about his take. "I find myself in the middle now between these two views," he says, "saying Islam is irrelevant to the issues and Islam the religion is the key." Even CAIR backhandedly recognizes Pipes's new place on the ideological spectrum. "Daniel Pipes had his day in the sun as the nation's premier Islamophobe," Hooper says. "In a strange way now, he's almost on the B-team of Islamophobes. The real attacks are coming from those who say that Islam itself is evil and must be challenged as a faith."

Of course, it may just be that there are fewer people for Pipes to argue with. Five years post-9/11, both George W. Bush and Tony Blair have, rhetorically speaking, moved in his direction, shedding vague nostrums such as "War on Terror" for formulations that specifically identify Islamism as the problem. No longer is the first response to a terrorist attack to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace."

But the fight is far from over. Pipes's latest project, called Islamist Watch, "combats the ideas and institutions of nonviolent, radical Islam in the United States and other Western countries," "exposes the far-reaching goals of Islamists," and "works to reduce their power" and "strengthen moderate Muslims." The day that Pipes's column on the Minneapolis taxi drivers ran, a flood of outraged e-mails, including several from Britain, Europe, and Australia, forced airport authorities to abandon their plan to accommodate the drivers. Islamist Watch, says Pipes, will seek to replicate that success on other fronts.

Sadanand Dhume is a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. He has finished a book about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia.

URL: http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/opinion_columnists/article/0,1406,KNS_364_5259542,00.html
Barnett: Enough of the hedgehog
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, tom@thomaspmbarnett.com
January 6, 2007

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus opined, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Let me submit that we're living through the final months of the decidedly hedgehog presidency of George W. Bush, whose strategic failures logically can be remedied by the election of a fox in 2008.
Americans generally prefer leaders to be steadfast and armed with a readily identifiable worldview. To have a mind subject to periodic change is considered weak and irresolute. We often label these individuals "flip-floppers," "liars" and - worst of all - "politicians," when "life-long learners" and "deal-makers" are equally applicable.

Our democracy regularly requires painful compromises to balance the extremes against the large, mushy middle that encompasses most American voters. After all, this republic is ruled by the majority, which sometimes craves the hedgehog's unwavering consistency and at other times welcomes the fox's intellectual agility.

During the 1930s Great Depression, Americans trusted the preeminent presidential fox, Franklin Roosevelt, to navigate those shoals and the subsequent world war. From his strategic imagination sprang much of the political structure that defined both America and the world across the rest of the 20th century.

When FDR passed, history offered us a true hedgehog in Harry Truman, to whom George W. Bush deserves comparison. Faced with a dangerously fluid global security environment, Harry gave 'em hell in the form of a military-industrial complex and the containment strategy, defining our Cold War vision for decades to come.

A war-weary America turned next to hedgehog Dwight Eisenhower, hoping his steadying hand would calm our increasingly volatile confrontations with the Soviets. The result was both comforting and suffocating: our "happy days" stability came at the price of McCarthyism, separate-but-equal race segregation and father-knows-best gender conformity.

A trio of fox presidents defined the tumultuous '60s. It started with John Kennedy's cacophony of bold visions (e.g., space race, foreign aid, irregular warfare), grew with Lyndon Johnson's legislative genius (civil rights, Medicare, voting rights) and culminated in Richard Nixon's stunningly ambitious diplomatic schemes (European detente, strategic arms treaties, opening to China). Linking all three in failure, however, was the unsolvable Vietnam conflict and the social unrest it eventually triggered back home.

Following Nixon's frightening self-destruction through the Watergate scandal, Americans selected three consecutive hedgehog presidents to achieve - across a lengthy historical arc - a resurrection of America's self-confidence and character. Gerald Ford afforded us a time to heal, while Jimmy Carter restored morality to our national politics and foreign policy.

But it was Ronald Reagan, a quintessential hedgehog, who most shaped the global superpower that emerged - seemingly unscathed - from the Cold War. His turbo-charged defense build-up begat the awesome conventional war-fighting capacity we possess today - the Leviathan ensuring peace among great powers. Most importantly, Reagan restored America's belief in its inherent goodness and its duty to combat evil in this world.

The Cold War's end demanded a new strategic nimbleness from presidents free of that era's ideological rigidity. We got that agility in global security affairs from George H.W. Bush's pragmatic administration and in global economic affairs from Bill Clinton's free trade-hawking presidency.

After the dizzying ride of the go-go '90s, George W. Bush pulled off the electoral miracle that was the 2000 election, promising more humility in our foreign policy. To that end, the inexperienced former governor was provided several steadying hands from previous Republican administrations (e.g., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice).

At least, that was the theory going in.

Because, when 9/11 intervened, Americans discovered George Bush - so long incurious about global affairs - to be the most myopically hedgehog president in modern times, a man whose entire legacy will be defined by his decision to invade Iraq.

Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign gears up, let me offer you this advice: seek out foxes and avoid hedgehogs. Don't listen to candidates who tell you this whole election boils down to one thing and one thing alone. While that approach made sense for some time following 9/11, America's clearly moved past that historical inflection point.

We need a president with more than one answer to every question, one whose toolkit is as diverse as his - or her - ideology is flexible. We need a dealmaker, a compromiser, a closer. We need someone able to finish what others cannot and start that which others dare not.

We need a leader who knows many things because we've had enough of those who know only one big thing.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

A recent Newsweek poll alleges that 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with
The direction the country is headed and 69 percent of the country is unhappy
With the performance of the president. In essence 2/3s of the citizenry just
isn't happy and want
a change.

So being the Die Hard American that I am, I starting thinking, ''What are we
So unhappy about?''

Is it that we have electricity and running water 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week?

<
FONT face="Courier New" size=2>Is our unhappiness the result of having air conditioning in the summer and
heating in the winter?

Could it be that 95.4 percent of these unhappy folks have a job?

Maybe it is the ability to walk into a grocery store at any time and
see more food in moments than Darfur has seen in the last year?

Maybe it is the ability to drive from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic
Ocean without having to present identification papers as we move through each
state?

Or possibly the hundreds of c
lean and safe motels we would find along the way that can provide temporary shelter?
I guess having thousands of restaurants with varying cuisine from around the world is just not good enough.

Or could it be that when we wreck our car, emergency workers show up and provide services
To help all involved. Whether you are rich or poor they treat your wounds and even,
if necessary, send a helicopter to take you to the hospital.

Perhaps you are one of the 70 percent of Americans who own a home, you may
Be upset with knowing that in the unfortunate case of having a fire, a group of
trained firefighters will appear in moments and use top notch equipment to
extinguish the flames thus saving you, your family and your belongings. Or if,
while at home watching one of your many flat screen TVs, a burglar or pro
wler
intrudes; an officer equipped with a gun and a bullet-proof vest will come
to defend you and your family against attack or loss. This all in the backdrop
of a neighborhood free of bombs or militias raping and pillaging the residents.
Neighborhoods where 90 percent of teenagers own cell phones and computers.

How about the complete religious, socia
l and political freedoms we enjoy
That are the envy of everyone in the world? Maybe that is what has 67 percent of
You folks unhappy.

Fact is, we are the largest group of ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has
ever seen. No wonder the world loves the U.S. yet has a great disdain for
its citizens. They see us for what we are. The most blessed people in the world
who do nothing but complain about what we don't have and what we hate about the
country instead of thanking the good Lord we live here.

I know, I know. What about the president who took us into war and has no
plan to get us out? The president who has a measly 31 percent approval rating? Is
this the same president who guided the nation in the dark days after 9/11? The
president that cut taxes to bring an economy out of recession? Could this be
the same guy who has been called every name in the book for succeeding in
keeping all the spoiled brats safe from terrorist attacks? The commander-in-chief of
an all-volunteer army that is out there defending you and me?

Make no mistake about it. The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have
volunteered to serve, and in many cases have died for your freedom. There is currently no
draft in this country. They didn't have to go. They are able to refuse to go and end
up with either a ''general'' discharge, an ''other than honorable'' discharge
or, worst case scenario, a ''dishonorable'' discharge after
a few days in the brig.

So why then the flat out discontentment in the minds of 69 percent of
Americans?

Say what you want but I blame it on the media. If it bleeds it leads and
They specialize in bad news. Everybody will watch a car crash with blood and
guts.

How many will watch kids selling lemonade at the corner? The media knows
This and media outlets are for-profit corporations. They offer what sells. Just
Ask why they are going to allow a murderer like O.J. Simpson to write a book and
Do a TV special about how he didn't kill his wife. Insane!

Should we stop buying the negative venom we are fed everyday by the media?
should we shut off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New York Times for the
bottom of your bird cage? Maybe we should start being grateful for all we
have as a country. There is exponentially more good than bad.

I close with one of my favorite quotes from B.C. Forbes in 1953:

''What have Americans to be thankful for?
More than any other people on the earth, we enjoy complete religious
freedom, political freedom, social freedom. Our liberties are sacredly safeguarded by
the Constitution of the United States, 'the most wonderful work ever struck off
at a given t
ime by the brain and purpose of man.'
Yes, we Americans of today have been bequeathed a noble heritage. Let us
Pray that we may hand it down unsullied to our children and theirs.''

I suggest we sit back and count our blessings for all we have. If we don't,
What we have will be taken away. Then we will have to explain to future
Generations why we squan
dered such blessing and abundance. If we are not careful this
generation will be known as the ''greediest and most ungrateful generation.''
A far cry from the proud Americans of the ''greatest generation'' who left us
An untarnished legacy.

Task Force Helps Revitalize Iraq's Industries
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5, 2007 – A team of 25 industrial leaders and business analysts is headed to Iraq today to join 35 others already there working to get almost 200 idle Iraqi factories up and running.

The industrial revitalization initiative is part of a sweeping plan to get Iraqis back to work, restore their livelihoods and jump-start Iraq's economic base, Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation, told Pentagon reporters yesterday.

Brinkley said the effort has another equally important objective: to ensure that Iraqis don't turn to terrorism simply because they see no other way to feed their families.

Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad last month there's strong evidence that rampant unemployment is fueling the insurgency. He pointed to the example of a former factory worker who had turned to planting improvised explosive devices for the insurgency so he could feed and care for his family.

Reopening industries and improving job satisfaction among Iraqis would go a long way toward neutralizing the forces giving rise to sectarian violence, Chiarelli told reporters.

"Putting young men and middle-aged men to work would have a tremendous impact on this level of violence we're seeing in and around Baghdad and also in the other provinces," he said.

Operating under the auspices of the Task Force for Improved Business and Stability Operations in Iraq, DoD and other U.S. agencies, Iraqi officials and the corporate world are working to reopen 193 industrial operations once owned by the Iraqi government.

These businesses, which have sat idle since Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003, once employed 10 percent of the Iraqi population, Brinkley said. But their impact on the Iraqi economy was even greater, because private-sector companies provided goods and services to the government-run factories. So when the factories closed their doors, the private companies' customer bases dried up and they, too, were forced to close.

The U.S. government's economic effort in Iraq initially focused on reconstruction, with an assumption that Iraq's private sector would eventually take over the idle government-owned businesses, Brinkley explained. But that never happened.

So the Task Force for Improved Business and Stability Operations in Iraq, which was working to improve DoD contracting operations in Iraq, shifted its focus in May to stepping up the process.

"We quickly came to the conclusion that we had a huge near-idle industrial base, that, reengaged, could put a lot of people back to work and restore normalcy to a sizeable amount of the population," Brinkley said. "So we immediately embarked on turning that industrial base back on."

Initial plans call for opening the first 10 factories quickly, with the estimated $5 million in start-up costs to be paid by the Iraqi government, he said.

Many of those 10 companies, which provide goods and services ranging from building materials to industrial products to clothing and textiles to drugs and medical supplies, are expected to open within the next six months, Brinkley said.

"Our expectation is that every month in 2007, we should be putting thousands of Iraqis back to work across the country," he said. "And if we do that, we will create a whole cascading series of beneficial impacts."

The challenges the task force faces are enough to stump even the most visionary Harvard Business School graduate.

"The work involved is (a) hard, roll-up-your sleeves" effort that requires getting on factory floors with plant mangers to determine what's needed to get it restarted, Brinkley said. "What are the constraints? Does it have supply? Does it have customers? Are the customers ready to buy things? If they don't have customers, how can we generate demand for them? Do they have working capital? Are the ministries ready to infuse working capital into the operation? Those are all the things you deal with in business."

Task force members are rotating into Iraq two weeks out of every month to address these issues and help get the factories running.

"What we are doing is assessing these factories," Brinkley said. "We are bringing in expertise. We are bringing international industry to bear to create demand for these factories."

But Brinkley emphasized that the goal is for the Iraqi government, not the United States, to fund the effort. "We want this to have an Iraqi face. This is Iraq's industry," Brinkley said. "And we want Iraq to be involved in getting it restarted, and they are extremely supportive of this."

Once the factories are opened, Brinkley said the U.S. military will contract with them as much as possible for goods and services supporting U.S. military operations in Iraq. Most of this business, which amounts to about $4 billion a year, currently goes to companies outside Iraq.

This will enable the United States to continue supporting its deployed troops in a way that reduces the logistical burden but also stimulates economic growth in Iraq, he said.

"We've set a collective objective that we would like to see 25 percent of that $4 billion flowing into the Iraqi economy within a year," he said.

As this effort moves forward, Brinkley acknowledged that newly reopened factories have the potential to become terrorist targets. Task force members, however, are optimistic that newly reemployed local workers will help prevent violence that threatens their livelihoods.

Brinkley noted that even in the most violent areas of Iraq, many of the empty factories went untouched by insurgents and looters alike. In some cases, new equipment, computers and inventory remained in place, a sign, he said, that local leaders protected them against damage or theft because they recognized their value to the community.

"That's a good story because what we think is chaotic is actually controlled," he said. "Somebody has made it clear, 'Don't touch that factory.' That's a good sign. We can get that factory turned back on."

This initial effort will have "a huge cascading effect" in Iraq, where a single breadwinner supports 13 other people. By comparison, the average U.S. worker supports four people, he said.

Ultimately, Brinkley said economic progress in Iraq will help drive other forms of progress forward. Reopening factories isn't the full answer, he said, but it is an important part of the overall strategy for success. "It's a piece of the puzzle," he said.

When Iraqis have the opportunity to return to their jobs and provide for their families, no longer will terrorism appear to be their only financial option, he said. When this happens, "an insurgent (will) become a zealot, not just someone trying to make a living," he said.
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